Flunk your exams and take a Saturday job - it'll all work out in the end

Saturday jobs, in fact, will teach you more than any exam. There is no exam that will teach you resilience honed by being the youngest person in the workplace and given all the dirtiest - literally dirtiest - jobs to do. My cousin was a shopgirl in an upmarket clothes store and women would regularly use the changing facilities as, well, the facilities.

It's always going to be the 17-year-old tasked with cleaning that up.

Resilience is similarly needed for going to work straight from class, in your school uniform, and dealing with the catcalls of customers and your fellow employees alike. There's terrible bosses, difficult customers and learning that among all the awfulness of the general public there is startling kindness too.

John Cridland, director general of the CBI, has said GCSEs should be scrapped and replaced with work experience as schools are placing too much emphasise on exam results. He believes children should be taking on work experience as young as 14, as they are maturing faster. It's a pity there are so few chimneys these days.

Fourteen is still a little young for a part-time job but work should be an essential accessory for any self-respecting 16-year-old. Unfortunately, a new report the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) states teenagers are shunning part-time jobs in order to focus on their studies. The report shows the number of teenagers combining part-time work with studies has halved from 42% in 1996 to only 18% last year.

More than half of pupils want to "concentrate on their studies" rather than take up a job. I'm pretty sure most of us, in my day, wanted to concentrate on our studies too - but you didn't have the choice. If you wanted a disposable income and to take part in social activities then work was it.

Saturday jobs are not as easy to obtain - part time jobs available across the entire economy for those aged between 16 and 64 has risen from 7.8 million in 2002 to 8.6 million in 2014. For 16 and 17-year-olds, however, the trend is not as positive: the part-time jobs they are most likely to do, retail, hotels and restaurants, have fallen slightly from 2.43 million in 2002 to 2.40 million last year - and where's the incentive for a modern teenager to take on a Saturday job anyway?

Children are given pocket money by their parents. Just given it, no chores needed. Young folks are used to owning extravagant items, iPods and iPads and iPhones on expensive contracts.

My friend used to do cream runs but who's going to have their milk delivered by the neighbour's kid when Ocado is available? And who's going to hire a 16-year-old shopgirl when there are so many adult alternatives? But the Saturday job is a vital rite of passage, teaching teenagers far more vital life skills than a Saturday viola lesson.

Sadly, the status quo is placing more emphasise on classroom learning and less on life experience, stymieing pupils from less affluent backgrounds, who must, by necessity, take time away from their studies to work, and well off pupils whose luxury in having well-off parents pay their way leaves them lacking work-developed skills.

In a week where the social mobility and child poverty commission said there is a class ceiling to obtaining employment in certain sectors, Sandie Okoro, global lead lawyer for HSBC Global Asset Management, is talking sense. She said private school kids should give the gap years in Chile a rest and take a job at JD Sports to develop resilience and pick up life skills.

Ms Okoro, whose Saturday job was in M&S, is my new hero. "They've gone off to China and built an orphanage, they've done this and done that. OK so your daddy is rich. That's great. But when have you worked at JD Sports at the weekend to earn some money? When have you dealt with the public? [The public] don't care where you went to school.

"I'd like to see the mundane and ordinary come back in."

Exactly right, Ms Okoro. Exactly right.